that he addressed him a letter, in which he commended his labours, and encouraged him to continue their prosecution.
Mr. Fison found an efficient fellow-labourer in the Australian field in Mr. A. W. Howitt, whose memoir is also attached. Although engaged in arduous official duties, he has found time to do excellent ethnological work, as his memoir will show. These gentlemen united in a list of printed questions touching organization, kinship, and consanguinity among the Australian blacks, which they distributed widely in the principal settlements of that country, inviting correspondence, as well as prompting inquiries. They also held personal intercourse with the natives as far as possible. From a number of original sources, they have accumulated a large body of facts, illustrating phases of savage life, and exhibiting the principal institutions, and some of the customs of the Australian aborigines.
In this connection I cannot forbear to remark, to the lasting credit of these gentlemen, that, while charged with weighty professional avocations, they have felt it their duty to stretch forth a timely, as well as an active, hand to save from oblivion the facts embodied in these memoirs.
The Australian tribes are melting away before the touch of civilization, even more rapidly than the American aborigines. In a lower ethnical condition than the latter, they have displayed less power of resistance. They now represent the condition of mankind in savagery better than it is elsewhere represented on the earth—a condition now rapidly passing away, through the destructive influence of superior races. Moreover, it is a condition of society which has not hitherto been thought worthy of special scientific investigation, although it is one of the stages of progress through which the more advanced tribes and nations of mankind have passed in their early
